Archive of Our Own

Tírion is strange under sunlight. The light of the sun is dimmer and less fiercely gold than the light of Laurelin had been. It wakes fewer answering sparks from the white stone of the city, and the edges of the shadows are softer. Everything seems strange, as if someone had drawn his home but been off in each minute particular. It is familiar, but not familiar. The city of his childhood and a city entirely strange to him, merged into one. 

When he actually enters the city, the strangeness does not abate. Not only are the colours strange, not only are there been new streets and houses and banners, but even the very sound and smell of the city has changed. Time has altered the city of his birth beyond all recognition, when he had once thought that Tírion would stand unchanged, gleaming white for eternity. 

He hears Quenya, but it is strange Quenya, edged with odd vowels and intonations, beyond the abomination that the Indisian faction had made of his mother tongue. And there are other tongues too that he can hear. Something that sounds like, and yet so very unlike the Thindarin he had learned just before his death. Quenya influence, he thinks, both Mírielin and Indisian Quenya, and something else. Something strange, with hasty consonants and clipped vowels. He does not think it related to even the ancient Kwendi he had learned of the elders as a child. There are more tongues he hears, dozens upon dozens of them, mostly with roots he can trace from the various tongues of elves he had learned over the course of his life. Avarin tongues, most likely. And there is one more, strange to him, as commonly spoken as Quenya or the probable-Thindarin. Quick, clipped, with some resemblance to the Thindarin he had once known but mostly lost in what seems like innumerable changes. A mortal tongue, he supposes, changing with mortal lifetimes, though whether the influence is of Men or Dwarves he cannot say, for he had died long before either mortal race awoke.

And the smell. Tírion had always had a very particular scent, one that he had hardly noticed until now. Forge smoke and molten metal and sawdust, and all the hundreds of other products of the city of the craftsmen of the Eldar, mixed with the ozone that covered the lands of the Ainur (that too, he had never noticed until he had sailed to Beleriand and found that the air was still, did not crackle with Power), and the sweet scent of the flowering meads of the Earth Queens that lay just below the city. Those are still there, but things have been added, scents of plants and foods and crafts strange to him. The layers of Tírion's scent have changed. 

Even the plants have changed. He does not know if strange ones have been brought from the strange lands across the Great Sea, or if Yavanna and Vána had made new ones over the years he had no body to learn of them. Most likely both, he decides, taking in the strangely sharp dark leaves of a tree as it brushes over his shoulder. That seems like one of Yavanna's experiments, for it recalls to him the angles of her husband's slate, and the gloss of the leaf takes the same sheen as the polished stone. The flowers beneath it, however, a carpet of tiny white buds with fresh green leaves, seem more like Vána's work - and the little flowerless plants mingled with them seem strange entirely. 

Fëanáro finds his way through the city in which he had lived all his long life as if he is a blind man or a stranger. It has been scarcely more than a handful of years to his reckoning. He knows the Tale of Years has been far, far longer than that, he has seen years uncounted reckoned on the tapestries of Vairë the Weaver, but time passes strangely within the dim halls of the dead. He did not feel the passing of the years, not truly. And now...now he sees the impact of years that he did not feel upon the city that he loves. 

This was his city once. The city in which he was born and his mother died, in which he was raised from a motherless babe to a motherless man, the city in which he wed Nerdanel and in which their own sons were born. The city in which their sons were raised to manhood, and which he set aflame with his feud with his half-brother. The city in which he swore the Oath and led a rebellion against the Valar. Tirion has seen all of him, and now he does not know it. It is as strange to him as Beleriand had been. 

Feeling ever more bewildered, and beginning to regret refusing dread Námo's offer to summon his kin to meet him upon his return to the living, Fëanáro searches for something, anything familiar in this strange city. He stands by that refusal, he decides as he walks through a market that sells foods he does not recognise, priced with a money system he does not recognise and sold in a language he does not speak. Even as strange and dizzying as Tirion has become, he does not wish to see his kin yet. Who would Námo have sent for? The half-brother he had held at swordpoint and abandoned in desolate Araman? Or the other half-brother he had held in scorn all his life? The half-sisters he had disregarded? Perhaps the father of who's love he had taken cruel advantage, or the stepmother he had tormented. Or worst of all, the wife he had cast aside or the sons he had sent to cruel, slow deaths and bound to an impossible oath. No. No, better that Fëanáro find his footing in this new, strange world first, that he make amends to those he has wronged and find a way, he knows not what, to fix things so that he can look his kin in the eye once more. 

After hours of wandering, he finds at last a place that he somewhat recognises. Perhaps it would not have taken so long had he gone to the Fëanárian quarter, but he had turned aside every time that he had caught a glimpse of red. He could not face the people he had led into darkness anymore than he could face the sons he had forged into weapons and broken. They had been loyal to him, and he had not been worthy of that loyalty, or of that love. So the most familiar streets of his former life, the ones hung with his banner and filled with his followers, are barred to him. And he had known every inch of Tírion once, but now...

It is a little space of green that he has found, in the most ancient part of the city. One of many gardens scattered throughout Tírion at its founding and, like the rest of them, added to over the course of many years. There are strange trees and flowers in it now, and time has worn away at the very earth beneath it. But, softened and flattened by the years as they are, he recognises the shape of the rolling hillocks beneath his feet. And strange new plants there may be, planted stern and strong with the weight of many years, but he recognises the very oldest. There is the great oak tree beneath which he had taken his first steps, toddling from father to fading mother, now taller and sturdier by far than it had once been. The grass beneath it is still grass, soft and green and fresh, thick as it had always been. 

Fëanáro sinks down beneath the tree, leaning his back against the trunk and closing his eyes. The tree is older than it had ever been when he knew it, it's consciousness grown slow and strange with time, but nevertheless he can feel the faint warmth of its recognition as he reaches his fea out to it. If nothing else in this strange city, this tree remembers him fondly. Remembers his first toddling steps and his childhood tears and the first steps of his own sons, all taken beneath its spreading branches. He lets his head tip back against the rough bark, and just breathes. 

In, and out. In, and out. Again and again, until the motion no longer needs conscious thought and the scream that had been building within him fades into nothing. Until his chest no longer feels tight, and the press of the world against him is no longer making him long for the cool nothingness of the halls of the dead. Until there is nothing but Fëanáro Curufinwë and the tree, as it had been so many years ago when all these strange sights and smells and sounds had been unheard of and the land had been one that he knew. 

When he at last feels less like one of Nerdanel's glass sculptures, the ones that a toddling Turkafinwë had stumbled into and had shattered into only so much glimmering dust, he opens his eyes again. There are others in the garden, he realises. Young lovers with hands entwined and sweet whispers on their lips, walking so closely together that it seems impossible for them not to stumble over the other's feet. Craftsmen with distant eyes and thoughtful frowns, more concerned with the fair visions in their minds than the world around them. And children. Many children, laughing and playing games that make sense only to them under the watchful eyes of their elders. 

He too had played here as a child, had brought his sons to play and even his grandson in the last brief days before the Exile. It is a good place for children to play, the grass soft and sweet, the slopes low and gentle. There are few of the less friendly plants that grow in other gardens for children's hands and mouths to find. It is close to the centre of the city, and to the house of the king - all of the children of Finwë and his descendants had grown up toddling on this green sward until their legs had strengthened enough to run and climb. It is good that children still play here, though the light under which they play is softer and dimmer than the fierce gold light he remembers. It is good that, after everything, there are still fair, innocent children to laugh upon a soft green sward. 

"Aiya." Says a voice from somewhere to his left, clear and sweet and high, like a silver bell. A child's voice. 

Fëanáro cannot help his start at being so addressed. "Aiya, winimë." He replies on instinct, looking down towards the little voice. It is a tiny girl-child, who cannot be past her first decade, with hair of midnight shadow and a slant to her sweet smile that renders it touched with sly humour. Nay, he corrects himself, it is two girls, mirrors of each other as his Ambarrussar had once been. Save that the one to the left wears the purple of a new-cut perfect amethyst rather than the rich red of heartsblood, he would have thought himself seeing double. 

"Will you play with us?" The one in red asks, tiny hands twisting together as if uncertain of his answer. It would perhaps have been more convincing had her twin in purple not been smiling with a particular confident tint that he recalls seeing on his sons. Children, it seems, do not change regardless of how much the world about them changes. 

He leans forward, matching the one in purple's challenging smile with a softer one, which springs to his lips almost unbidden - he had had no daughters of his own, but he has raised seven sons and seen raised from childhood all the children of his half-siblings and of Nerdanel's own brothers and sisters. There had been more than one niece among their number, and even Artanis had followed him with eager, toddling steps once. He had been good with children, if nothing else. 

"What do you wish to play?" He asks, feeling how soft and hoarse his voice has become after millennia without a single spoken word, without lips for those words to pass, without a tongue to form them. Perhaps these two small girls have seen those of the Returned before, with their seamless grey robes and hoarse voices, for neither bats an eye at the unlovely sound of his voice. Instead, each tiny girl takes one of his hands and drags him from the shade of the familiar oak tree to a patch of the green sward where several other small children are playing a game that is explained to him with many excited giggles and linguistic mistakes that he dare not correct for fear of them being developments in the tongue instead of mistakes made by children. 

It is an old game, the one that these laughing children wish to play. He had played it in his time, as had his own sons, in the bright light of Laurelin before the Trees were killed and the Deathless Lands plunged into death and war. Now, beneath the dimmer light of Vása, fair elf-children without a speck of light in their eyes explain the same rules to him in tongues he only half comprehends. The ringleaders of this little band are clearly the twin girls who had first approached him, bolder and louder by half than the rest of their compatriots. So had his own twins been with their own friends. 

"Forgive me," he says, as the explanation of the familiar old game comes to a rambling end, "but I know not your names, my ladies. Should not even a lowly soldier know the name of his liege lords?" That sparks delighted smiles from the little tyrant leaders of the army to which he has found himself conscripted, and a clatter of names from his fellow soldiers. 

The little generals open their mouths to introduce themselves, but are forestalled by a cry from a fair elf lady only just stepping from the trees onto the green sward on the arm of a pale-haired elf lord. "Aratissë! Tárissë! Leave the poor elf alone." The twins drop his hands as if burned as the elf lady comes closer, midnight hair fluttering on the wind and mingling with the trailing sleeves of her rich green gown. "My apologies, my lord, the twins have been told not to harass strangers into overly rough games but they rarely heed such commands."

"It is no trouble." Fëanáro reassures the elf lady, now close enough for him to see the fine beauty of her features, like enough to his lamented father to give him pause. "I had twin sons of my own who likewise obeyed no command save their own." Until he had led them into death, that is. 

The elf lady's winged brows bend into a frown that oddly recalls his law-father to him. "By your garb you are not yet a day Returned,'' she rebuts, now sounding like his silver-tongued firstborn in an argument, "no healer would deem you prepared for aught save resting in a quiet room. Such noise and excitement must tire you greatly after the peace of the halls of the dead."

"I find it more a pleasant change after long years with neither sight nor sound." Fëanáro argues, and then realises that there is indeed a deep tiredness within the arms and legs unused to movement, and the body unused even to breathing. "Yet perhaps you are right. Such a game may have been more than I am yet able for."

A satisfied look crosses the lady's face, and she turns her attention to corralling the two girls into some semblance of order. Vása is setting, Fëanáro realises, the sky turning to fiery gold and orange as beautiful as any forge fire. The shadows are lengthening. This must be sunset, he realises, the replacement in this new age for the Mingling of the Lights. It is just as lovely as its predecessor had been, though he doubts that the night that follows will be any match for Telperion's silver beams. Night, of any kind, must be unlovely indeed - though at least this night shall last for a count of mere hours. 

"And where are your kin, friend?" Asks the elf lord, a dim-eyed elf of the Teleri, though judging by the green and brown garb perhaps of the Thindar instead. His accent is strange too, no hint of Telerin to it. Almost Thindarin, he would name it, save for a strangely clipped way of pronouncing his consonants. As though he has spent much time among the quick, hasty people who made the clipped sounding tongue that is now spoken as much as Quenya and Thindarin in the streets of Tírion. "It is ill done for them to leave you without care so soon after rebirth. When my grandsire was returned from the halls of the dead, I did not leave his side for more than ten years until he was accustomed to life once more, yet I see no such kinsman at your side."

There is in his voice no hint that he knows who Fëanáro is, only a tinge of disapproval for his careless kinsmen. "I asked that they not be told of my return." Fëanáro reassures the elf lord. "It is no fault of theirs."

It does not seem to appease his displeasure, but the twin girls escape the elf lady's attempts to braid their hair back in favour of swarming him with lisped tales of their exploits that day. He laughs, seemingly keeping up with the strange tongues with which they speak with an ease that Fëanáro, who had once spoken more tongues than any elf of his acquaintance, cannot help envying. 

"He will be an excellent father when the time comes." The elf lady says, smiling fondly at the scene. Fëanáro cannot help his start, for he had believed them to be the parents of the twins. She catches the motion, and then smiles at him. "Nay, we have no children of our own. These are my youngest sisters, not my daughters. My parents had business at court today and these two they felt too young to burden with court manners as yet." 

That too, Fëanáro finds familiar, from golden days and silver nights when his fights in court with Nolofinwë (nay, he forgets himself Finwënolofinwë) had turned all the movings of court to poison. The Ambarrussar, men grown but still little more than boys to his eyes, he had ever set to watching their nephew - sometimes in this very garden, where such poison would touch neither his youngest sons nor his grandsons. If nothing else, he regrets that the last days of Light had been made so dark by the poison with which he had let Moringotto taint his heart. His sons and grandson should never have felt fear or uncertainty while the Trees still gave light to Aman, and he should never have led them to the dark lands of Beleriand where there was neither safety nor certainty. 

"I imagine your sisters are most glad of the reprieve." He manages after a moment, hoping that the catch in his throat will be put down to the accustomed hoarseness of the Returned. 

Whether or not that is the case, the lady makes no sign. She only smiles, inclining her head with all the stately grace he remembers his father once possessing. A noble lady then, judging by her bearing and the fine stuff of her gown, and the circlet holding her dark hair back from her face. "Indeed they are. But forgive me, I have not introduced myself'' She places her hand over her heart and bows, a perfect courtly bow after the fashion of his father's court. "Anárorë, Princess of Eryn Galen. My husband is Legolas Greenleaf." 

She says her husband's name with ease, as if she expects Fëanáro to recognise it. He does not, of course. He has seen faces in the tapestries of passing ages but they hardly come accompanied with names. Perhaps, he thinks, looking closer at the elf lord's features, he does recognise him from some of the later ones. He had been oft accompanied by a strange, squat figure that had seemed entirely composed of oddly forged armour and thick, wild hair of a red that would have been faded and dull beside Nelyafinwë's. He opens his mouth to return the introduction, and then pauses. A lady of the Noldor, even if she seems to have wed into a Moriquendi court and to have been born many thousands of years after his own death, would recognise any name he could give. He has that much faith in his people's unchanging tendency for recording and passing on history at least, if nothing else. 

"You need not," the lady says, holding up an imperious hand, "I have known those of the Reborn upon whom their names sat ill after so many years of nameless nothingness. You are one of them, or else you are one who does not wish his identity known. Come and eat with my husband and I tonight, if you still wish not to be known to your kin." 

"And if I wish not to be known to them for the wicked deeds that have kept me in the halls of the dead for years uncounted?" Fëanáro challenges, though why he does so, he does not quite know. Perhaps because this princess and her husband seem so unstained, and he does not wish to bring the curse of his oath upon their household in exchange merely for one meal. He does not wish to see, even in his mind's eye, the night-dark taint that he will leave across the sunlit noon of their lives. 

The elf lady replies only by laughing. "My father was a kinslayer in his time, my lord. You need fear no condemnation from us." If she knew that she was speaking to he who had no doubt led her father into his sin, Fëanáro wonders if she might speak differently. 

He opens his mouth to speak again, but before he can, the twin girls run towards the treeline, once more babbling a mile a minute. Fëanáro follows their trajectory with his gaze. There is a man standing at the edge of the sward, just beneath the thin screen of trees that hides the garden from the rest of the city, with a dark-haired woman on his arm. Both of them are already laughing, arms opening to the small children heading for them with no heed for their fine court dress and jewels. 

Fëanáro feels himself freeze as if struck, as if once more his sons have burst into the darkened circle of the Máhanaxar with the news that his father has been murdered. He is unsettled in his body as it stands, so newly placed within it once more, but now he cannot feel any of it. He is standing upon soft grass in a fair garden with sweet breezes, but for all that he can feel of it he could be standing in the grey nothingness of the halls of the dead once more. 

"Another Returned?" The father of the twins repeats, amused, and lifts his eyes towards where his eldest daughter stands with the man his youngest daughters indicate. The smile melts from his face like so much hot wax. His face drains of colour until it is as white and set as it was in the tapestry of his death which Fëanáro had done his level best to tear into pieces. He had not suceeded, being a bodiless fea, but he had tried, oh how he had tried. 

"Venno?" Says the woman at his side, softly, one white hand leaving her daughter's hair to rest on her husband's arm. "My love, what is wrong?" He does not recognise her, Fëanáro thinks, though she is dark haired and grey eyed as any Noldo. Too young, perhaps, or born across the Great Sea, though her eyes bear the same Light as her husband's. No, he does recognise her, faintly, one of many who had followed him across the Sea, the daughter of one of his father's lords perhaps. 

He swallows, trying to force his lips to part, and for his tongue to spill forth some few of the myriad gilded words that he had once had at his command. It is not he, in the end,  who speaks first. "Aiya." says his son, as hoarse as Fëanáro himself. He looks well, Fëanáro thinks beneath the numbing dread, the fear that screams not yet, not yet. The hand that he saw Findekáno cut off to free him from that dreadful cliff is returned, and the scars of his long torment are gone. There is still the shadow of time and death in his eyes, but there is laughter too, and there is light in them once more. He looks so much better than he had in any of the tapestries Vairë had seen fit to show him. If nothing else, Fëanáro is glad that he had the chance to see his son healed of his torment and grief. 

At last, he forces his numb lips to part. "Aiya, yonya." Fëanáro whispers, so quietly that he is not sure whether his son has heard him. But the gleaming copper head inclines nonetheless. 

"Yonya?" Anárorë repeats, and then her keen eyes are bent on Fëanáro. Her hand fumbles backwards until it meets her husband's. "Yonya?" Her knuckles are going white with the force of her grip upon her husband's hand, Fëanáro notes, and then suddenly there are a new pair of boots in his vision. Not boots. Court shoes, beneath fine crimson robes. 

Nelyafinwë has crossed the sward already. How curious. His wife remains beneath the trees with her two daughters holding her hands. That makes sense. Fëanáro would not have allowed his children near his own father had Finwë bound him to an oath that forced him to slay his kin three times and become an abomination upon the earth. He wonders if Nelyafinwë will merely tell him to stay away, or to leave Tírion and the lands of the Noldor entirely. If he had worse words for him, they would be more than justified. Nothing could ever atone for what Fëanáro had done to his sons, his beautiful, perfect sons. 

"Go to your mother, Anárorë." Nelyafinwë says softly. His daughter opens her mouth to protest, but then closes it again, tugging her husband towards her sisters without voicing whatever complaint she had been formulating. The sound of their footsteps fades away towards the trees, until all that Fëanáro can hear is the soft sound of his firstborn's wife speaking to the clear-voiced twins. "Will you say nothing, Atar?"

"What is there to say?" Fëanáro asks, still not daring to raise his eyes from the grass at his feet. "I have visited uncounted woes upon our people, and upon thee most of all my son. I bound thee to a terrible Oath and left thee to bear its weight, and led thee and all our kin into darkness. I have not loved thee and thy brothers as I ought, I have cast aside thy mother as she deserved not, and I have rent our great people in twain. I am no father or husband. I am but a creeping thing, not worthy to walk among the Eldar. I wanted to wait, until I had made myself into something that could face thee again. Someone who would not be a shame to thee and thy house."

Nelyafinwë is silent for a long moment. Then, quietly, "And when would that have been, Atar? When the sun and moon burned out and the Enemy returned to bring the war to end all wars? What would have been the sign that you were worthy to see us and take up your life once again? How would you have known? How much longer would you have kept us waiting?"

"I do not know." Fëanáro whispers. "I only know that it was here my feet took me. I am sorry. I shall not trouble thee again, I promise thee, though I shall swear no oath. Thou never need see me again, nor need tell thy mother or brothers that I have returned to trouble thy peace."

He waits, for whatever sentence will be passed from Nelyafinwë Maitimo, prince of the eldest line of Finwë's House. But there is only silence for a long time until, at last, beyond all bearing, he raises his eyes. His son is weeping silently, tears spilling from his eyes down to fall in glistening crystals to the grass below them. His lips are pursed tightly together, as they used to be whenever little Nelyo had been trying very hard to stop them trembling. Fëanáro wonders if that is the case now, after so many thousands of years. Neither of them speaks.

And then, just before Fëanáro thinks that his son will speak at last or strike him, the soft sound of steps against grass. A white hand tucks itself into the crook of Nelyafinwë's elbow, and kind eyes in a sweet face meet Fëanáro's own. 

"Aiya, father of my husband," says the woman who has wed Fëanáro's eldest son, "we are glad indeed to finally see you returned to us beyond all hope." Her voice is gentle, and her smile as sweet as the rest of her face. 

"We are." Nelyafinwë rasps, before Fëanáro can open his mouth to disabuse this woman of her delusion. "Ai, Atar, we had long given up hope of your return."

"Hope?" Fëanáro repeats. "Hope? For, what, for me to bring death and division among our people once more?"

Nelyafinwë shakes his head, beyond words once more. It is his wife who speaks again, as easily as if she has always spoken for the two of them. Perhaps she has. Perhaps it has been so long that it seems that this is how it has always been. How would Fëanáro know how long his firstborn has been wed? "Your sons have missed their father, my prince." His daughter by law says. "And the mother of my heart has missed her husband. They have longed to welcome you back. Do not deny them this, I beg you. Let them see you once again." 

"Are you not angry with me, my son?" Fëanáro asks, feeling the world shift beneath his feet. He had been so certain that his wife and sons would regard him as the terrible, accursed, creeping thing that he had become without realising it. He had never dreamed that any of them would take the news of his return to easily. "I have brought so much Doom upon you, upon your brothers, do you not hate me?"

Nelyafinwë shakes his head, and his hand, his only hand still after all these years, reaches out. "Not you, my father. We were angry perhaps once, but it has been many thousands of years. Now we have only missed you and longed for your company once more." 

"I have wished a few words with you, for the sake of my husband." Nelyafinwë's wife says primly, the spark of something lighting in her eyes. That is more like the reception Fëanáro had expected, and yet she says no more than that. Perhaps she is waiting for him to be more settled in his body, yet even that is more than he had expected. 

"Come home?" Nelyafinwë asks. "Please, Atar. Come home." 

Fëanáro has never been able to deny his firstborn (save once only, when he burned bloodstained ships as if that could burn away his crime). He allows himself to be led, as if he is a little child, towards the old familiar streets and into a house that he still knows as well as the day that he had left.

"We have seven daughters and a son," Nelyafinwë's wife says cheerfully as they walk through the changed streets, apparently oblivious to Fëanáro's stumble (eight grandchildren), "and Maitimo fostered two more boys in Beleriand. One of them died as a mortal but the other, Elrond, is one of the great lords of these later ages."

"None of them have shown any inclination to the forge," Nelyafinwë is telling him as they come into the door of a familiar house, "you shall have to remain content with Tyelperinquar as your heir in the third generation, I fear."

The house is as it had always been. The rich, dark panelling against the walls gleams almost as it had under Laurelin's golden light before, though not quite. He can see the work of his own hand still in some of the carvings on the wood. He had never been so skilled as his wife, but they had both been capable of anything to which they had turned their hands, and he had been young and less prideful then. He had wanted to help build the house in which they would live with his own two hands. It is reassuring, he hopes, that the traces of his handiwork remain here even so many thousands of years later. 

"Maitimo is that you?" Calls a familiar voice, as clear and strong as it had been the day that Fëanáro in his madness had cast its owner aside. "I thought that you were hosting Anárorë and Legolas this eve." 

"There was a change of plans, Ammë." Nelyafinwë calls back. "We found a guest I thought you would want to see." 

Nerdanel comes out into the corridor then. She is outwardly unchanged by the many years that have passed since last Fëanáro has seen her, save that the red of her clothes has given way to simpler russets, and the elaborate braids she had adopted for court have been abandoned in favour of a simpler single braid down her back. Her eyes are as bright as ever, and her shoulders as straight, and even the work worn shadows on her hands seem the same. But the tale of the long years is visible in her eyes, and in the downturn of her lips. 

As Nelyafinwë had before her, Nerdanel goes white as if struck with a mortal blow the moment her eyes meet Fëanáro's own. Even her lips lose their colour, paler than they had been even when she had pled with him to leave her just the twins, just one son, one out of seven and he had denied her even that. 

"Nerdanel." Fëanáro breathes, determined this time to be the one to speak first. "I am...words fail me. I am sorry for everything. You were right and I was wrong and I should have listened to you." He considers kneeling, suing for her pardon as a humble petitioner before his queen (whoever rules in the king's house now be damned, Nerdanel Istarnië is more queen than they could ever be), but she has never had the patience for such gestures. Or at least, she did not. 

At last, long after Nelyafinwë and his wife and daughters and son by law have gone past them into the dining hall, she stirs. She takes in a long breath, and smooths down the front of her russet kirtle. "There are many things that I have wanted to say to you over the long years." She says evenly, and holds out her arm as she had so many times in better days when the trees of silver and gold had still bloomed. "But none of them do I wish to say now. Come and eat, my husband, and be welcome home at last." 

He lets Nerdanel lead him into the dining hall, feeling the oddly familiar knowledge that she will not have the same restraint the moment that they are alone once the meal is ended. No doubt he will hear exactly what she thinks of him, and she will probably insist on one of the infuriating new tongues that she knows he dislikes. Perhaps she will send him away from Tírion entirely. The mere thought sends his heart down to the floorboards. But for now, she has forgiven him, and they are touching and breathing the same air, and it is at once enough to bear him through all the long ages and will never be enough if they never let go until the Dagor Dagorath arrives. 

It is almost a wave of noise in the dining hall. He had expected his sons, and the wives and grandson that had been there when he had led them all from Aman in a blaze of fire and glory and doom. He had even half-expected the eight (eight) children that Nelyafinwë had sired. But there are far more elves seated about the table than he could ever had imagined. His sons, his darling, perfect sons, his sons who he has wronged so terribly, are all standing by the door and yet the table is not even half empty 

He cannot fit them all in his arms anymore, he could not have done so long before the bliss of Valinor had faded all those years ago. But for old times sake, Fëanáro tries his best to fit all seven of his grown sons into his arms again, and wishes he could never let go. There are many tears, and recriminations, and Fëanáro knows he has earned both. But there is also laughter and joyful tears and delight at his return, and though he has earned none of them, Fëanáro accepts them greedily. His sons are well, they are whole, he has not broken them entirely. That is enough to fill a Void of sorrow and brim over. 

Many of his sons have wed, he realises, and there are children running about the table now, children of his grandchildren or even of his great-grandchildren. Fëanáro is inundated with a deluge of names, of wives and husbands and sons and daughters, and grandsons and granddaughters and so on and so on. But then, at last, the introductions come to an end, and they sit down to eat.

He is given a seat that he is told has remained empty at the head of this table for more than seven thousand years. The wood creaks and groans under his weight, and he is forced to revisit the assumption that the chair is a skilfully made replacement of the one he had known. Perhaps it is in fact the same one after all, preserved unchanged for all of these many years in the impossible fool's hope that it's owner would one day return. He wonders if, had he not returned, Nerdanel would have kept it there until the end of time. 

"I am glad you did not have to keep this until the end of time." He tells Nerdanel softly, as the clatter of dishes being passed and the murmuring of conversation begins, accompanied by glances up and down the table, mostly up towards him. 

Nerdanel smiles, a flash of teeth that he had not realised until now just how much he had missed it. "If you had kept me waiting until the end of time, I would have used the chair for kindling when the Sun and Moon went out." She says quite serenely, serving herself some strange, round, golden thing that he assumes must be some form of vegetable. "Or I would have broken it over your head for making me wait so long. I have been coming to a decision about it for the last Age."

"Most of us leaned towards breaking it over your head." Kánafinwë puts in from his place at Nerdanel's right hand, opposite Nelyafinwë and beside the Vanyarin minstrel he had wed before even the Ambarrussar were born. "I said she should have used it to kindle the fire in your chambers when you returned, regardless of whether it was the Dagor Dagorath or no. It felt poetic." 

Melilótë, from her place at his side, hides a fit of laughter in her hand. Feanaro had always considered her rather inspidly sweet, like most Vanyar, but he wonders if perhaps that is not quite the case. There is a glint in her eye that reminds him that she too is a minstrel. Perhaps she had given Kánafinwë the idea in the first place.

"Perhaps I still shall." Nerdanel says, without so much as hesitating. She takes another serene bite of food, and smile at Fëanáro. Torn between fear and delight, Fëanáro smiles back. He remembers her smiling so across his own father's table at Irímë in the morning of the world, and wonders if perhaps he shall find frogs in unpleasant places as Irímë had once. Or perhaps she shall deputise the Ambarrussar to act in her place.

"The stars are out!" Calls one of the smaller children from far down at the other end of the table, one of Celegorm's half-Maia daughters, if Fëanáro remembers correctly. It would explain the strange texture of her hair, the colour of tree bark. "I saw the first star!" She is bouncing in place, little flowers budding in her hair and tiny fingers curled into an arrow out of the window towards the dark sky now studded with awakening stars. 

Nerdanel smiles down the table at the child, as warmly as she had ever smiled at their own children. "Well done, Culufindë." She coos to her granddaughter, as she ever had to Tyelperinquar, sitting halfway down the table himself with another young child on his knee. "What do you want for your prize?"

Culufindë darts a glance towards her parents, and then scuttles up the table to perch on Nerdanel's knee and whisper in her ear. Fëanáro is much surprised when Nerdanel listens to the whispering and then promptly passes the child over to him. The little girl beams up at him, displaying needle sharp teeth and strangely bright eyes. She is wearing the soft green of new leaves, and little sandals that might very well be formed out of leaves themselves. "Aiya, Haru!" She chirps, and settles herself more comfortably on his lap, starting to pick at the remaining food on his plate. 

It is, Fëanáro realises, with the warm weight of his granddaughter on his lap and the rest of his family about him, night. The sun has truly set and the stars are out. But with his wife beside him, and the large hall filled with his children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, it does not seem so terrible as he had thought it would. The shadows are dark, but the stars only seem brighter, as they never had in a world still filled with Ungoliant's mirk. And the torches and the firelight are gentler than the fierce red flames of his memory. They are golden and soft, and fill the room with gentle, flickering shadows as if from a hundred tiny Laurelins. 

Night is not so terrible then, Fëanáro thinks. So long as there is light to beat it back. Perhaps, in the morning, he shall go to the king's house to see his father once more. Perhaps he shall go to the forge with his son and grandson. Perhaps he shall simply spend the day learning the names of all his many descendants. But for now, it is enough to know that there is light to beat back the darkness - and that it will only be a few hours before Vása returns to chase the shadows back into hiding. 

He remembers faintly the cry that had come all the way to the halls of the dead, so many years ago. Little news came to the dead, save by way of Vairë's tapestries, and yet this one cry had shaken the halls to their dread foundations. ''Aurë entuluva!" That long ago far away voice had proclaimed, in an accent strange to Fëanáro though he had recognised that the speaker meant to use Quenya. The day shall come again. 

And so it shall, and so it shall do until the sun is cast down from the sky and the very fabric of Arda torn asunder for the end of days. But that, Fëanáro finds himself assured, is not to happen for many, many ages of the world yet. The sun will rise tomorrow. And the night will pass.